You can’t be omni-channel if you don’t have the foundational customer and product master data in one place. However, most fashion companies today comprise separate business units such as retail, wholesale, and manufacturing. These units often work independently, resulting in large, separate volumes of data competing against each other rather than working in harmony.

At this point, it becomes very clear that successful collaboration between different areas is necessary, as retailers have long compensated the lack of real-time inventory visibility across channels with more or less inventory – resulting in situations of markdowns, out-of-stock or excess stock.

Take vertical fashion companies like Adidas and s.Oliver. These organizations traditionally sell their products to specialist stores or other retailers. Ideally, each of these sales channels should be mapped separately, taking into account every step of the entire process from planning to sales. However, in today’s omni-channel world, alignment with the requirements of the end customer is a must – which means information must flow freely along the entire value chain in order to respond to changing customer demands.

SAP Fashion Management provides answers to these challenges. This unified real-time platform opens up new opportunities by centralizing data and offering transparency across multiple channels - wholesale, retail and ecommerce businesses. What does that mean to an end customer? What modifications do I need to do in my internal processes with these sweeping changes? These are questions that still remain for many fashion businesses.

The focus of the webinar was mainly answering the most frequently asked questions from global fashion brands and retailers, curated during our multiple engagements with them as the co-innovation partner of SAP on the Fashion Management Solution (SAP FMS).

Couldn't make it to the live webinar? Sign up now to view the recording. You'll learn how synchronizing master data across your entire business can reduce out of stocks and markdowns.